How is Trump’s war of attrition with the Houthis going?

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Chalk it up to the growing understanding that Washington may be expending too many precious weapons on a small militant group with a history of outlasting its much bigger and more powerful adversaries. Chalk it up, too, to powerful interests inside the national security community that want Washington to refocus its American military assets away from the draining conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and toward the Indo-Pacific. According to the New York Times, “Pentagon officials have told allied counterparts, lawmakers and their aides in closed briefings that the U.S. military has had only limited success in destroying the Houthis’ vast arsenal of missiles, drones and launchers.” Moreover, “a senior Defense Department official recently told congressional aides that the Navy and the Indo-Pacific Command were ‘very concerned’ about how fast the military was burning through munitions in Yemen, a congressional official said.” This comes only days after news that the DoD was deploying six B-2 stealth bombers—30 percent of the U.S. stealth bomber fleet—plus supporting aircraft and a Nimitz-class carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, to join the USS Truman carrier group in the Indian Ocean. These concerns are not new. The military is burning through its stockpiles, and has been since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Biden administration’s insistence that the U.S. give Kiev “whatever it takes” to win the war there.

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The U.S. has given Israel over $17 billion in arms and financing since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Those weapons have been used in Israel’s war in Gaza, as well as in the Lebanon war against Hezbollah and retaliatory attacks and missile interceptions against Iran. This is in addition to the U.S. using its own assets in the Red Sea to intercept Iranian missiles targeting Israel last October. And the flow of weapons continues. Just a week ago, it was reported in Israeli news that Washington was sending a third THAAD missile defense system, of which the U.S. only owns seven, to Israel. “This would put almost a third of the U.S. THAAD systems in [Israel],” said Jennifer Kavanagh, Senior Fellow and Director of Military Analysis at Defense Priorities. “This incredible commitment of scarce resources is out of proportion with the limited U.S. interests in the Middle East and the Trump administration's stated intent to focus on security threats in Asia.”

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